Elise Asher
Elise Asher • Lauren dela Roche • Susan Fortgang • Huê Thi Hoffmaster • Joe Overstreet • Pat Passlof • Michael Rosch • Miriam Schapiro • Rumi Tsuda • Paul Waters
Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Taipei Dangai 2024, and its return to the fair for the second consecutive year. The gallery will return with significant works by postwar women abstractionists, along with contemporary painting.
Highlights of the presentation include a monumental 1974 painting by Pat Passlof, being exhibited for the first time. Passlof (1928–2011) created abstract paintings that, like poetry, responded to memory, experience, and place without narrative descriptors. Passlof was a private student of Willem de Kooning. Through the 1950s and early ‘60s, she lived and worked on East Tenth Street in New York City: the highly concentrated “art colony” where painters and sculptors gathered to create artist-run spaces to exhibit the new generation of artists. Her work often suggests abstracted landscapes, like the later work of Claude Monet. A monumental Passlof painting was acquired in 2023 by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas. Her work was also acquired in 2022 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in 2017 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work is also represented in the collections of Black Mountain College, the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Milwaukee Museum of Art, WI.
The gallery will also showcase the work of Elise Asher (1912-2004), another woman of Abstract Expressionism. who was the subject of a solo exhibition at the gallery in Fall 2023. In her work of the 1960s Asher incorporated calligraphic handwriting and text into clouds of color and brushwork. The personal style of these linear abstractions was Asher’s unique contribution to the post-war abstraction. Asher was also a noted poet who published three volumes of poetry; her own poetry is used in numerous paintings. Asher’s paintings are suggestive, rather than literal and legible.
In addition to these two women abstractionists, the gallery will present significant work by Miriam Schapiro, well-known as a link between the women of abstract expressionism and the women’s art movement. In the early 1970s, she founded the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, alongside Judy Chicago. Her paintings of the period explore themes of the female body and women’s lives.
These 1960s and '70s paintings will be shown alongside contemporary work by Lauren dela Roche and Huê Thi Hoffmaster. Dela Roche’s recent work, painted on found, mended, and repurposed cotton feed sacks show multiplying and echoing views of a nude woman, who becomes a recurring central character. This form—elongated, with rouged cheeks, stockings, and long raven hair—appears in dream-like compositions. More than representing any specific person, the female form is a symbol for dela Roche, signifying, for example, Mother Nature. Hoffmaster’s work, although it depicts abstracted flowers, connects to that of Elise Asher. The clustered lines in his paintings suggest calligraphic writing. Hoffmaster, who is Vietnamese-American, uses thickets of paint, and the form of the flower to connect to issues of hybridity. The paintings oscillate between abstraction and representation, Eastern and Western painting traditions.
Rumi Tsuda and Michael Rosch more explicitly combine Eastern and Western visual traditions into their works. Tsuda, who was born in Japan and lived in New York beginning in 1980, created her monumental Manhattan Peace Shrine based on people she encountered on the subway. Over a period of three years, Tsuda used diligent observation to represent individuals making up the city, celebrating the multicultural metropole. Taking the shape of Manhattan and representing local New Yorkers on individual pieces of wood, the work nonetheless engages with Eastern aesthetics, as the artist included 108 portraits as a reference to the sacred number in Dharmic religions and tops the work with a self-portrait rendered as a low-relief carving, reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks. Rosch, on the other hand, uses the Western tradition of oil painting. He visualizes trade and exchange, superimposing decorative interventions inspired by Japanese paper onto landscapes sourced from 19th-century European illustrations.
The gallery will also present paintings by Susan Fortgang, Joe Overstreet, and Paul Waters, made between the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period of time when all of these artists were working with experimental painting techniques. Overstreet will be represented by work from his Flight Patterns series: unstretched canvases made with a spectrum of painting applications, attached directly or tethered to the wall with ropes. Overstreet will be the subject of a survey show at the Menil Collection in Houston, TX in 2025. Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight (January 24 – July 13, 2025) will be the first major museum exhibition in thirty years devoted to the work of this pioneering abstract painter.
